Team Foundation Server User Management Tool
One of the exciting things about working in the aftermarket solutions space is having the opportunity to make some tools that really help customers with common frustrations that they find in our products. Today I had the opportunity to see a "proof of concept" of one of these great tools--a tool that might be able to help quite a few of our customers that are going to adopt our brand-new Team Foundation Server (TFS) product when it launches in a few months. In case you haven't heard of it yet, Team Foundation Server, part of Visual Studio Team System, is the backend server component that helps enable collaborative development features integrated right into Visual Studio. If you'd like to hear more about Team System, I'd highly encourage you to read https://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/default.aspx Rob Caron's excellent VSTS blog.
One shortcoming of TFS is that when you add a new user to the system, the user is only created in the Team Foundation Server...not in the other two areas where the account needs to be created (in SQL Server and in Sharepoint). This creates extra work for the administrator of the TFS...they need to go into Sharepoint and SQL and add the user, with the correct permissions, manually. The Aftermarket Solutions team here has decided that we could build a tool that overcomes this obstacle...now we need to figure out whether or not customers really want this tool.
We've found one such customer--he's already opened a suggestion in the MSDN Product Feedback center:
If you think that this would be a valuable tool to have as well, leave a comment on this post, and vote on the suggestion in the Product Feedback Center.
Hope to be reading those comments soon!
Update 1/27/2006: We have been developing this tool actively, and will post the binaries for the CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the tool on the following GotDotNet CodeGallery site:
https://gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=cea30722-cd0a-4ef4-9c75-a5a5e4932b05
Joe Morel
Program Manager
Developer Aftermarket Solutions Community Team